pen-l threads with some
of my faves (Tom and Rob (now going by the name 'bantam' and sparsely postin)
---

----------- Michael Perelman
wrote, >Bush is bringing back everybody except Fawn Hall. Maybe she is
next. Not likely. Fawn ratted, however reluctantly. I've been poindering
the Pondexter appointment all day and I think I've solved the riddle. The
Bush II admin needn't have appointed Abrams, Reich, Poindexter to avail
itself of their wisdom or talents. The appointments were clearly meant
to be symbolic. But what do they symbolize? They symbolize exactly the
reverse of Poindexter's resignation in 1986. They celebrate the well-known
but officially denied fact that Reagan ordered the specific violation of
laws and that Bush the senior (along with the entire R. cabinet, the congress,
the media & the public) knew damn well that was the case. The appointment
of Poindexter officially retracts the denials now that it is "too late"
to do anything about the impeachable offenses. As Lawrence Walsh wrote:
"Regan, Meese, and Casey then embarked on a desperate gambit, which Regan
laid out that day [November 24, 1986] in a memorandum entitled 'Plan of
Action.' 'Tough as it seem,' he wrote, 'blame must be put at NSC's door
-- rogue operation, going on without president's knowledge or sanction.'
The goal would be to 'try to make the best of a sensational story.' "The
authors of the plan concluded that it would not be enough to fire North.
They needed more than a scapegoat; they needed a firewall. Poindexter had
to go. The next day he resigned at a meeting in which Reagan and Bush expressed
their regrets." Tom Walker --------------- Tom, I think it's more than
symbolism, though that plays a role. The Bush League is a bunch of cronies
who support each other all the time. They punish their enemies and reward
their friends. Poindexter took the heat, so he's given a reward. -- Jim
D. ------------------------------- MIYACHI TATSUO Psychiatric Department
KOMAKI MUNICIPAL HOSPITAL JOHBUSHI,1-20 KOMAKI CITY AICHI Pre JAPAN 0568-76-4131
miyachi9@gctv.ne.jp There is not "necessity of socialism" Rather, there
is only possibility of socialism. Marx firstly expected revolution when
economic panic happened, but later In Capital, Marx depended upon growing
social movements themselves. <<marx quote deleted>> ." Thus, Marx
abandoned economic or political crisis as a base of revolutionary movement
and became to expect emerging international movement from within as the
base of revolution. But Lenin adopted political crisis as chance of revolution
and later his judgment became dogma as " crisis theory". So Stalin's strategy
focused how and when economic&political crisis happened. Now we has
large number of social movements, such as anti-globalizaition, anti-racism,
feminism, left-ecology, worker's & consumers cooperatives, local community
using LETS and local banking which does not create fictitious capital(For
example Mondragon) . If crisis theory can't explain these movements, it
is simply because these movements occurs from contradictory capitalist
society. Most important is that Marx tried firstly to prove ability of
working class to destroy civil society, not tried to explain economical
phenomena from without. In Japan, from pre-war to 1960', Marxists focused
mainly market analysis modeled after Stalin's dogma. Its objectivist tendency
was destroyed by new left movement. ---------------- Socialism is necessary
in the sense in which food is necessary: not as something which will be
but as something that must be if we are to survive. It is pure religiosity
to claim that socialism _will_ come; it is close to self-evident that unless
it comes we will plunge ever deeper into the barbarism RL predicted. Doug
doesn't like quotes, but no one has ever said it better than Mao: If you
don't hit it, it won't fall. Carrol -------------------- on the necessity
of god, goddess, gods, goddesses, or a combination of the above by Devine,
James 22 February 2002 17:46 UTC < < < Thread Index > > > [was:
RE: [PEN-L:23057] Re: On the necessity of socialism and grammar] Rev. Tom
writes: >Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the
same reason as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods.< I
was raised as a Unitarian, a "faith" that believes that there exists at
most one god (and argues about whether or not to capitalize). So my question:
is why believe in the existence or non-existence of "god"?[*] why not simply
express ignorance on this question? As far as I can tell, there's no logical
argument either for or against the existence of "god." Similarly, all the
empirical evidence can be interpreted in more than one way. People have
religious experiences in which they encounter supernatural entities who
they interpret as good. But looking at the so-called "Holy" Land suggests
that there ain't anything holy in this world of ours. But we'll never know.
(BTW, the issue of the so-called "transformation problem" isn't analogous
to that of the existence of supernatural entities. It's a standard scholastic
trap that ensnares the left the way other scholastic traps that keep non-leftists
out of trouble. If it didn't exist, the Mandarin-minded Marxists (MMMs)
would think up some other problem to keep themselves occupied. Besides,
there's an easy solution...) ;-) [*]Economic theory suggests that we shouldn't
be concerned only with the existence of "god" but also its stability and
uniqueness. As is the "god" of 2002 the same as the one of 1999? Just as
the "real GDP" of 2002 isn't strictly speaking comparable to that of 1999,
perhaps there are index-number problems... Jim Devine jdevine@lmu.edu &
http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine > -----Original Message----- > From:
timework@vcn.bc.ca [mailto:timework@vcn.bc.ca] > Sent: Friday, February
22, 2002 6:24 AM > To: pen-l@galaxy.csuchico.edu > Subject: [PEN-L:23057]
Re: On the necessity of socialism and grammar > > > Sabri Oncu wrote, >
> >> Um, as soon as we can figure out whether > >> God does or does not
exist........... > >> > >> Ian > > > >My dear Ian, > > > >This problem
is not that difficult. I solved it when I was 14. I > >realized that there
was no difference between believing in the > >existence or non-existence
of God. > > Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For
> the same reason > as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods.
The > distinction is > crucial. There IS a difference between believing
in God and > believing in "a" > God or "the" God. God is a unique part
of speech that cannot > be a noun. The > article makes God into a noun,
which is grammatically absurd. > It is like > saying, in English, "I the
go to store" or "She a eat apple." > It is clearly, > obviously ungrammatical.
God is also not a verb, an > adjective, an adverb, a > preposition or any
other common part of speech. In fact, one > might say that > the linguistic
function of God is precisely to stand as other > to all the > common parts
of speech and thus to remind us of the > incompleteness, the > inadequacy
of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique > grammatical term > for
the ultimate unutterableness of being. > > Tom Walker --------------- >
Jim Devine jdevine@lmu.edu & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine Actually,
neoclassical general equilibrium economists have proved that God exists.
The tatonnement auctioneer! All knowing, capable of millions of decisions
instantaniously, does not need to be paid to exist, and able to determine
the future in perpetuity. Sounds like God to me. Paul Phillips, Economics,
University of Manitoba ---------------- The presumption is always that
X doesn't exist; hence the absence of convincing arguments against the
existence of X is in no way evidence that X exists. The premise must be
the non-existence of god, and so far as I know there are not only no argumenents
against that premise, there are no arguments of any weight to the effect
that one should even consider the arguments for the existence. Just because
there is a tradition that a one-ton invisible green frog crouches in my
living room is no sign I should bother to listen to arguments that such
does exist. The only acceptable premise for any argument as to the existence
of god is the non-existence of god; hence all arguments for god are incoherent.
:-) Carrol ----------- I agree absolutely there's no logical argument for
or against. My own position is based entirely and radically on grammar.
Tom Walker --------------- Greetings Economists, Tom writes about the value
of knowing one way (believing in religion) or the other (being an atheist
not believing there is a god) about God. ----------------------- Tom 22
February 2002 21:19 UTC quotes, Jim Devine wrote, As far as I can tell,
there's no logical argument either for or against the existence of "god."
Tom replies to the above, I agree absolutely there's no logical argument
for or against. My own position is based entirely and radically on grammar.
Tom Walker --------------------- Doyle The basic argument for religious
belief is that one is aware of the 'spirit' in being, or 'like' descriptions
of a mind outside human beings. An atheist says there was no soul there
in the first place to situate the argument about how a human being really
thinks. The atheist seeks to understand what happens when someone really
dies. If it were entirely un-important to not know the difference and that
one belief is the same as the other, then neuroscience would be cluttered
with various attempts to find the soul. Perhaps George W (the Christian)
will tell us why U.S. science is so un-Christian to not be focused on the
search for a soul. Tom may argue that 'believing' is the issue as a formula
like activity resembling a grammar. The word, God, in Tom's view is a peculiarly
empty word. For Tom God appears as just a place holder in a grammatical
structure that describes an arbitrary belief. While the emptiness of the
concept comes through from Tom's remark, that also misses some important
elements in religion. Religion is not just belief, Religion is an explanation.
An explanation is a product of an activity of the mind in which one person
tells another person what they think is the meaning of something. As I
am saying above god is a mind which someone tells another person they know
about as god. That mind (god) is some place besides in a human head. Or
if in an human head, the "immortal" non material aspect of the person God/King
God/head. For an atheist in this contemporary time, I can't see a lot of
difference between the religious explanation (as a human being conveys
it to another) and having an avatar (a figure representing a human face)
pop up when the atheist comes to the rock on the hill, and give the atheist
an explanation of the rock. See "The Dream Drugstore, Chemically Altered
States of Consciousness", J. Allan Hobson, MIT Press, 2001 The difference
between my proposal and Tom's theory is that Tom asserts grammar is a meaningful
way to convey belief in god (the word being empty), and I say explanation
is. Explanation while not well understood in a scientific sense offers
better grounds for understanding the mental processes underlying religion.
Hence if one must feel there are parallels between two opposed belief systems,
Atheist as true believers similar to the religious believers, then understanding
how the mind produces explanation provides a more practical route to understanding
the truth of the assertion. thanks, Doyle Saylor PS Tom is a wiseacre in
starting this thread, and I recognize the difference in seriousness of
his message and my own. Still the point he made is worthy of my attention
in a serious manner anyway. -------------- Why not indeed! One of the things
I find most annoying about religion is each faith's insistence: (a) that
G/god is ultimately unknowable, and (b) that it, as a particular faith,
knows perfectly well what G/god is and what G/god wants. So much avoidable
agony has resulted throughout history because of these preposterous claims
to certain knowledge of a subject that is, by definition, beyond understanding.
Carl -------------- Lest we forget, science inherited this notion and has
gotten one hell of a lot mileage out of it. G/god as ultimate guarantor
of the intelligibility/knowability of the world. Schrodinger, Einstein,
Whitehead, Cantor and Godel made the issues involved over the signifier
damn complicated . ---------------- Ian I too am a Unitarian Universalist,
and my answer is that we believe in God, but we refuse to speculate in
detail on what She's like. This invariably draws an interesting reaction
whenever I say it. Scott Gassler ------------------- Like if She's a sexually
reproduced being (else, whence Her sex?), why don't Mum or Dad get any
kudos or divine authority, may we expect the pitter-patter of little divine
feet at some stage, and who would Dad then be? God 'explains' the unexplained
with the inexplicable, I reckon, and I wield Occam's razor very much in
the Carrol-Coxian manner on this. 'God' mystifies and misdirects (especially
interpellating our moot afterlife-selves at the expense of our being/agency
in the world) more than is economically efficient. Cheers, Rob. ------
Hey!!!!!! Rob's turned hissself into 'bantam'. sure enough he
is still active as such thankgod -- this one belongs in the socialism and
grammar thread but pen-l frequently drops thread stitches: ---------------G'day
Tom'n'Sabri, > Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs.
For the same > reason > as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or
gods. The distinction > is > crucial. There IS a difference between believing
in God and believing > in "a" > God or "the" God. God is a unique part
of speech that cannot be a > noun. The > article makes God into a noun,
which is grammatically absurd. It is > like > saying, in English, "I the
go to store" or "She a eat apple." It is > clearly, > obviously ungrammatical.
God is also not a verb, an adjective, an > adverb, a > preposition or any
other common part of speech. In fact, one might say > that > the linguistic
function of God is precisely to stand as other to all > the > common parts
of speech and thus to remind us of the incompleteness, > the > inadequacy
of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique grammatical > term > for
the ultimate unutterableness of being. I know where you're coming from,
Tom, or at least I know there's a big unutterable there somewhere that
we all come from and dwell in (I have only recently allowed myself to let
the prepositions hang; wow, it's like peeing outadoors!). To avoid confusion,
though, I'd not call it God - admit rather, and often, that whereof we
cannot speak we must pass over in silence. Apropos of which, I append this,
a favourite (necessarily longish) quote, by Pommie composer Anthony Powers
(which can be had in full at http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/ politicsphilosophyandsociety/
story/0,6000,563387,00.html : "I came back to the Tractatus after reading
Ray Monk's life of Wittgenstein and Bryan Magee's Confessions of a Philosopher,"
says Powers. "What became clear to me was how misinterpreted the Tractatus
had been by mid-20th- century linguistic philosophers, and how what it
was really about was the importance of recognising non- linguistic reality.
The logical positivists and linguistic analysts thought everything could
be said if it was said in the right kind of controlled and logical way.
But the Tractatus is saying almost the opposite - that there are so many
dimensions of life and experience that are beyond the capability of language
to explain or even adequately express." The famous last sentence of the
Tractatus - "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" -
is, according to Powers, meant as an injunction to philosophers "to put
up or shut up", and certainly not as a discouragement to musicians. "According
to Wittgenstein, there are huge things - the whole areas of moral and religious
philosophy and aesthetics - that cannot be 'said' but can be 'shown',"
says Powers. "The honest thing philosophically is to be silent about those
things. What I'm trying to do is to show in the piece that music is a way
of reaching into that silence." Cheers, Rob. ------------------ I thought
"Time" played that role in the Timeworks philosophy. By the way "God" is
a noun-- sharing this grammatical feature with "Time" But perhaps this
is part of your humor or animal spirits. I dont know. Where is the commandment
laid down that a noun must have a definite or indefinite article accompanying
it? I assume you mean to be goofy. While it is ungrammatical to put a definite
article with a pronoun even if before the pronoun rather than after it
as you do, but on the contrary it is not ungrammatical to place definite
articles before abstract nouns such as "truth" "goodness", "virtue" etc
even though they can stand on their own without articles. So what on earth
is ungrammatical about putting "a" or "the" before God. A he is usually
male by the way... Cheers, Ken Hanly ---------------- Greider from the
nation 'reformer from Goldman Sachs' http://csf.colorado.edu/mail/ pen-l/2002I/msg01942.html
--------------- Doyle Saylor wrote, >PS Tom is a wiseacre in starting this
thread, and I recognize the >difference >in seriousness of his message
and my own. Still the point he made is >worthy >of my attention in a serious
manner anyway. [1585-95; < MD wijssager prophet, trans. of MHG wissage,
late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise person, c. OE witega; akin to WIT
2] Greetings Economists, I characterized Tom's thoughts as a wiseacre,
and the truth in that is that Tom has a light heartedness, and wit, not
wiseacre about him. I enjoy Tom's comments. Secondly I acknowledge the
seriousness of his comment, Tom, [1585-95; < MD wijssager prophet, trans.
of MHG wissage, late OHG wissago, earlier wizzago wise person, c. OE witega;
akin to WIT 2] Verily my tongue hath worn a hole in my cheek. But I am
also dead serious. I would just add that the emptiness of the God term
is potentially a productive emptiness, although it is also potentially
deadening. How can there be different kinds of emptiness? Think of "aporia"
and "hollowed out". Aporia carries thought forward with an expectation,
hollowness arrests action with disappointment. Fortunately, hollowness
can be transformed to aporia, which is the method of Negative Dialectic.
=========== Doyle My response would parallel the remarks that John Searle
makes about Chomsky's UG (Universal Grammar) in the New York Review of
Books, February 28, 2002, to Tom's comments about God in a grammatical
sense. in particular Searle writes on page 34, Searle characterizing Chomsky's
theory, The overall conception of language that emerges is this: a language
consists of a lexicon (a list of elements such as words) and a set of computational
procedures. The computational procedures map strings of lexical elements
onto a sound system at one end and a meaning system at the other. But the
procedures themselves don't represent anything; they are purely formal
and syntactical. As Chomsky says, "The computational procedure maps an
array of lexical choices into a pair of symbolic objects...The elements
of these symbolic objects can be called "phonetic" and "semantic" features,
respectively, but we should bear in mind that all of this is pure syntax
and completely internalist." ========= Doyle Which characterize grammar
in a computational sense. And that is what Tom is saying about the word,
God, that it is a place holder in a grammar, that has a null meaning, or
to quote Tom from the thread origin, ======== Tom 22 February 2002 14:29
UTC, Sabri has framed the issue correctly. Both are beliefs. For the same
reason as Sabri, I believe in God but not in a God or gods. The distinction
is crucial. There IS a difference between believing in God and believing
in "a" God or "the" God. God is a unique part of speech that cannot be
a noun. The article makes God into a noun, which is grammatically absurd.
It is like saying, in English, "I the go to store" or "She a eat apple."
It is clearly, obviously ungrammatical. God is also not a verb, an adjective,
an adverb, a preposition or any other common part of speech. In fact, one
might say that the linguistic function of God is precisely to stand as
other to all the common parts of speech and thus to remind us of the incompleteness,
the inadequacy of any conceivable utterance. God is the unique grammatical
term for the ultimate unutterableness of being. ========== Doyle, To which
in the above cited article Searle remarks about Chomsky's theories in parallel
to Tom's assertion, Searle page 34, ..."Of course, Chomsky is right to
insist that "English" is not a well-defined notion, that the word has all
sorts of looseness both now and historically. I am a native English speaker,
yet I cannot understand some currently spoken dialects of English. All
the same, the point remains: a group of letters or sounds is a sentence,
or a word, or other element of a language only relative to some set of
users of the language. The point has to be stated precisely. There is indeed
an object of study for natural science, the human brain with its specific
language components. but the actual languages that humans learn and speak
are not in that way natural objects. They are creations of human beings.
Analogously humans have a natural capacity to socialize and form social
groups with other humans. But the actual social organizations they create,
such as governments and corporations, are not natural, observer-independent
phenomena, they are human creations and have an observer-dependent existence.
As their speakers develop or disappear, languages change or die out." ========
Doyle God is a social construct hence my assertion about god being an explanation.
One cannot expect that god has a grammatical role. Grammar being the division
of speech into apparent parts related to human experience and habitual
routines of expression. The meaning of god may fit what Tom says, but the
grammatical structure does not call for a hole or null place as Tom would
like to assert. Inventing such a null place grammatical structure akin
to constructing a new mathematical theorem might have value if it can be
shown to have practical utility. So I would ask what is the utility? thanks,
Doyle Saylor Tom's remaining remarks are pasted below for easy reference.
======= Tom A 17th century German dramatist wrote: "Whosoever would grace
this frail cottage, in which poverty adorns every corner, with a rational
summing up, would be making no inapt statement nor overstepping the mark
of well-founded truth if he called the world a general store, a customs-house
of death, in which man is the merchandise, death the wondrous merchant,
God the most conscientious book-keeper, but the grave the bonded drapers'
hall and ware house." Walter Benjamin used the passage as a motto for his
chapter on Allegory and Trauerspiel in _The Origin of German Tragic Drama_.
I cited it last week in connection with the Georgia crematorium. God as
a book-keeper seems at first a peculiarly inapt metaphor, inasmuch as book-keeping
is a matter of reducing all activity to monetary value. But God is *the
most conscientious* book-keeper, which is to say there are no off-balance
sheet transactions. Mere money cannot be God's unit of account. Compare
this book-keeper God to the neo-classical "tatonnement auctioneer" for
whom vain money is the sole unit of account. One might say the only difference
is their unit of account. But that difference makes all the difference
in the world. The auctioneer is thus revealed as an imposter, a huckster,
a fraud, a false prophet (false profit). "What if the most important questions
about the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center as historical
Events transcend the terms of the current debate and the underlying framework
it serves?" http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2002I/msg01951.html Tom Walker
------------- All I know is that if one dwells on the topic too long the
grammar begins to look wrong. For example what is the relationship between
the preposition "in", the verb believe and the term God? In this context,
the utility may well be reminding us not to go on at length about the ineffable.
Speaking of which, the ineffable is one of those negatives for which there
is no positive, isn't it? ---------------- It's been a long time since
I 'studied' this (the scare quotes reflect the lightness of that study
at the time), but I believe in such cases the "in" should be considered
a part of the verb (as in the german separable verbs) rather than a preposition.
In any case, prepositions are wildcards in any language: you must remember
memorizing "idioms" in any foreign language you studied: i.e. phrases that
cannot be construed by looking up the definitions of their individual words.
Carrol ----------------differetn thread ------- - G'day Carrol, > > Sabri,
Marx's theory in question here is about value -- a form of > social > >
relations peculiar to capitalism. As such, it would not have > relevance
> > under socialism. > > ------------ > Sweezy saw the premise that "economic
science" would exist under > socialism as the ideological basis of authoritarian
socialism. > Supposedly production will be for use, and productive choices
will be > made politically. That can't be reduced to a science. (I think
I've > botched up the argument some.) >------------ Any social formation
faces the need to allocate resources (including labour) here rather than
there. We've tried command economies and found that, sans market signals,
it couldn't be done where and when it was tried - or at least, that it
was so wasteful and inequitable that it couldn't survive as a system in
the world of the time. If we take away the hostile external environment,
WW2 (which wiped out a generation in the SU), and poor calculation technology
(computing power exists today that did not exist then), we're still left
with one of the central planks of economic science: the balance of incentives.
As I see it, the misprojections, untrue inventory reports, uncoordinated
transport systems, ridiculous quotas etc were a function of poorly coordinated
incentive systems (there was fear, currying of favour and such). The only
way to rid ourselves of that is to avoid centralised authority and its
attendent stratification (and what we've hitherto called 'politics' would
go with it). Which leaves commies with the job of construcing a democratic
mode of resourse allocation. I imagine some balance between limited markets
and something like Trotskiy's workers' councils or Shliapnikov's trades
union management (if there's a real difference there) would provide an
answer, but I've never quite managed to satisfy myself on the issue. I
know you've often argued we shouldn't be in the business of writing recipes
for the future's kitchens, but it's a problem, as Justin has argued, any
commie who wants to sound convincing should have thought about a lot, I
think. Anyway, I imagine lots of technical knowledge would have to be available
to the democratically determining body if the job is to be done well enough
to make life universally worth living. The thing is to have technicians
and not have technocrats, I think - else, no democracy -> no socialism.
Cheers, Rob. ---------------------G'day Jim, > where can I find the article
-- by Terry Gilliam or one of the other > Monty > Python alumni -- about
applying Bush's war-on-terrorism strategy to > deal > with the Irish Republican
Army? Here 'tis: Monty Python on "Bombing for Peace" OK, George, make with
the friendly bombs Terry Jones Sunday February 17, 2002 The Observer
<<snip>> Of course, it goes without saying that we would also have
had to bomb various parts of London such as Camden Town, Lewisham and bits
of Hammersmith and we should certainly have had to obliterate, if not the
whole of Liverpool, at least the Scotland Road area. And that would be
it really, as far as exterminating the IRA and its supporters. Easy. The
War on Terrorism provides a solution so uncomplicated, so straightforward
and so gloriously simple that it baffles me why it has taken a man with
the brains of George W. Bush to think of it. So, sock it to Iraq, George.
Let's make the world a safer place. ------------------- G'day Peter, You
write: > Right. I argued in "Actually Existing Globalization" (published
in a > collection a > few years ago) that industrial policy is ultimately
understandable > only as > technology policy, but that the era of national
technology (or > innovation) systems > is largely over. At the time I reviewed
some of the literature pro > and con; I > think there are some references
in my article. I'll be glad to send > an electronic > copy to anyone interested.
> > Peter > ----------------- I've not seen the paper (and I'd really like
to ... ), but I'd argue the US has exhibited many signs of an almost mercantilist
corporatist policy approach to optimising intial advantage in IT - pushing
TRIPs into the Uruguay Round, allowing anti-competitive mergers and such
to ensure world-beating economies of scope and scale, pressuring the rest
of the world into abandoning public telecommunications backbones - in fact
- policy timing, from the AT&T transformation, to fighting off Japanese
HDTV standards, to the shift of the public/private internet debate in the
early nineties, to letting the money-rich but opportunity-poor BabyBells
off the leash in '96, to allowing media monoliths to consolidate across
media in '02 - well, it all looks like a technology policy of sorts - perhaps
at a structural (diffusion and control) rather than technical (invention
and innovation) level (the DoD drove a lot of the latter before the end
of the space race and Vietnam War occasioned a need for civvie market opportunities,
in the context of the post '73 dip in national competitiveness and national
accounts all 'round), but arguably a technology policy nevertheless. Or
not? Cheers, Rob. ------------------- Sut Jhally sounds like my kind of
fellow alumnus. Unfortunately his lecture is on a Friday afternoon, one
of my most congested. I'll see what I can do. I disagree with one claim
in the article. Dallas Smythe wasn't the first to look at media as economic
institutions. I wouldn't claim Walter Benjamin as first because absolute
priority is difficult to establish. But he was certainly

looking at the media as
economic institutions long before Smythe. While were on the theme of advertising
and the apocalypse, I've dusted off my sandwich boards and have begun flaneuring
around again in earnest. The rationale and highlights will unfold serially
on sandwichman.blogspot.com. Tom Walker ----------- is kind of hijacking
selected words out of context and insinuating that they mean something
else is pointless. I would say juvenile, but would be insulting to children.
The context was the role of advertising in the media and culture. The point
is about advertisers promising people things they can't deliver. Perhaps
advertisements have improved Doug's sex life. If so, perhaps he could tell
us how. ------------- Doug Henwood wrote, >Gadzooks! Sex!! Triviality!!!
Band together and protect the youth >from these threats!!!! >Remind me
what's progressive about this? It sounds like Donald Wildmon. ------------------
And my juvenile point was that a lot of this critique is a rather undigested
rehash of a lot of Puritan hair-shirt crap. You may think the quote is
out of context - I think it's a revealing expression of anxiety over pleasure
and sensuality. It is also likely to have little political appeal beyond
a rather affluent gang of PC lefties (or the voluntarily poor). I'm with
Mandel on this one. Doug ---- Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, pp. 394-396:
>6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards) of the >wage-earner,
which represents a raising of his level of culture and >civilization. In
the end this can be traced back virtually >completely to the conquest of
longer time for recreation, both >quantitatively (a shorter working week,
free weekends, paid >holidays, earlier pensionable age, and longer education)
and >qualitatively (the actual extension of cultural needs, to the extent
>to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human content >by
capitalist commercialization). This genuine extension of needs is >a corollary
of the necessary civilizing function of capital. Any >rejection of the
so-called 'consumer society' which moves beyond >justified condemnation
of the commercialization and dehumanization >of consumption by capitalism
to attack the historical extension of >needs and consumption in general
(i.e., moves from social criticism >to a critique of civilization), turns
back the clock from scientific >to utopian socialism and from historical
materialism to idealism. >Marx fully appreciated and stressed the civilizing
function of >capital, which he saw as the necessary preparation of the
material >basis for a 'rich individuality'. The following passage from
the >Grundrisse makes this view very clear: 'Capital's ceaseless striving
>towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the limits >of
its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements >for the
development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided >in its production
as in its consumption, and whose labour also >therefore appears no longer
as labour, but as the full development >of activity itself, in which natural
necessity in its direct form >has disappeared; because a historically created
need has taken the >place of the natural one.' > >For socialists, rejection
of capitalist 'consumer society' can >therefore never imply rejection of
the extension and differentiation >of needs as a whole, or any return to
the primitive natural state of >these needs; their aim is necessarily the
development of a 'rich >individuality' for the whole of mankind. In this
rational Marxist >sense, rejection of capitalist 'consumer society' can
only mean: >rejection of all those forms of consumption and of production
which >continue to restrict man's development, making it narrow and >one-sided.
This rational rejection seeks to reverse the relationship >between
the production of goods and human labour, which is >determined by the commodity
form under capitalism, so that >henceforth the main goal of economic activity
is not the maximum >production of things and the maximum private profit
for each >individual unit of production (factory or company), but the optimum
>self-activity of the individual person. The production of goods must >be
subordinated to this goal, which means the elimination of forms >of production
and labour which damage human health and man's natural >environment, even
if they are 'profitable' in isolation. At the same >time, it must be remembered
that man as a material being with >material needs cannot achieve the full
development of a 'rich >individuality' through asceticism, self-castigation
and artificial >self-limitation, but only through the rational development
of his >consumption, consciously controlled and consciously (i.e., >democratically)
subordinated to his collective interests. > >Marx himself deliberately
pointed out the need to work out a system >of needs, which has nothing
to do with the neo-asceticism peddled in >some circles as Marxist orthodoxy.
In the Grundrisse Marx says: 'The >exploration of the earth in all directions,
to discover new things >of use as well as new useful qualities of the old;
such as new >qualities of them as raw materials; the development, hence,
of the >natural sciences to their highest point; likewise the discovery,
>creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself; >the
cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, >production
of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, >because rich in qualities
and relations - production of this being >as the most total and universal
possible social product, for, in >order to take gratification in a many-sided
way, he must be capable >of many pleasures, hence cultured to a high degree
- is likewise a >condition of production founded on capital.... -------------------
Doug, From reading your position on consumption over some time, and Mandel
below, I believe Mandel is not with you, nor you with him. Mandel opens
with <<<<=>>>> which is hardly about moving up to designer
sheets. Why you always react with your "hair shirt" response to any criticism
of consumption which does NOT raise living standards is beyond me. Do you
skip Mandel's parenthetical " (the actual extension of cultural needs,
to the extent >to which they are not trivialized or deprived of their human
content >by capitalist commercialization)."? --------------- Not being
a mind reader, I haven't the slightest idea what Doug's "a lot of this
critique" refers to. Sut Jhally? The Media Education Foundation? Dallas
Smythe? The critique of consumerism in general? (and here we could branch
off into other specifics, Marcuse's repressive sublimation? the voluntary
simplicity movement? Juliet Schor? etc. etc. etc.). Your juvenile "point",
Doug, is too vague to be a point and so sweeping as to be every bit as
reactionary as the "Puritan hair-shirt crap" you conjure up. Fascinating
passage from Mandel and a paradoxical pledge of allegiance to, presumably,
Mandel's first sentence -- but not his second. Mandel's SECOND sentence
begins with a catalogue of and homage to precisely those conquests that
have been arrested in North America during the quarter century since the
source text, _Late Capitalism_, was translated into English: the shorter
work week, the weekend, paid holidays, politically sacrosanct pension universality,
affordable post secondary education. That same sentence concludes with
the qualification, "to the extent to which they are not trivialized or
deprived of their human content by capitalist commercialization." Pardon
my slow, deliberate reading but *trivialization* is precisely what Jhally's
comment referred to and what you, Doug, lampooned as puritanical crap.
The anxiety isn't over pleasure and sensuality per se, but over the commodification
of pleasure and sensuality -- a process that is no doubt so far advanced
that it becomes hard to conceive of pleasure and sensuality in any other
terms. Hard? Conceive? Ha ha. Perhaps I should have said something about
penetration, too. It's an anxiety that you obviously share, Doug. Otherwise,
how to account for the compulsive eroto-detective work, the discovery of
"revealing" expressions (what one might decades ago have referred to as
Freudian slips). Fear not, Doug, your anxiety is my own. I have no wish
to renounce pleasure in the name of an abstract critical purity. But as
for having little political appeal, consider that the unabashedly anti-pleasure
fundamentalist right gets an incredible amount of political mileage out
of the anxiety that, presumably, no one but affluent PC lefties and the
voluntary poor share (not to mention you and I, Doug). Doug Henwood wrote,
>And my juvenile point was that a lot of this critique is a rather >undigested
rehash of a lot of Puritan hair-shirt crap. You may think >the quote is
out of context - I think it's a revealing expression of >anxiety over pleasure
and sensuality. It is also likely to have >little political appeal beyond
a rather affluent gang of PC lefties >(or the voluntarily poor). > >I'm
with Mandel on this one. > >Doug > >---- > >Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism,
pp. 394-396: > >>6. The genuine extension of the needs (living standards)
of the >>wage-earner, which represents a raising of his level of culture
and >>civilization. In the end this can be traced back virtually >>completely
to the conquest of longer time for recreation, both >>quantitatively (a
shorter working week, free weekends, paid >>holidays, earlier pensionable
age, and longer education) and >>qualitatively (the actual extension of
cultural needs, to the extent >>to which they are not trivialized or deprived
of their human content >>by capitalist commercialization). Tom Walker -------------------
Non-commodified pleasure and sensuality under pre-capitalism and much of
capitalism are, more often than not, provided by unpaid women's labor,
e.g., Mom's Home-cooked Meals. Commodified pleasure and sensuality under
capitalism affordable to the working class are, more often than not, provided
by low-paid labor of men and women of color in sweatshops, e.g., mass produced
and yet stylish Kenneth Cole goods. But for commodification of pleasure
and sensuality, women today would be still spending all day carrying water,
preparing food, sewing clothes, and so on (poor women in poor nations still
in fact spend much of their time carrying water, etc.!). But for commodification
and urbanization, which have come to allow human beings to live independently
of the pre-capitalist duty to marry and procreate (or else), we wouldn't
know such identities as gay men and lesbians (pre-capitalist male-male
same-sex desire appears mainly to have been channeled through hierarchical
relations between men and boys, as among ancient Greeks and monks and samurais
in pre-modern Japan, without becoming a fixed sexual orientation -- women's
same-sex desire generally went unsanctioned even in pre-modern societies
that celebrated certain forms of male-male love). Just as wage labor is
a necessary stage through which production must pass to become socialized
enough for socialism, commodification of pleasure and sensuality is a necessary
stage through which (broadly defined) reproduction gets socialized enough
for socialism. -- Yoshie --------------- Mine too. But in all the analyses
of this genre I've seen - and along with Jhally, I'm thinking of things
like Adbusters, the Rev Billy, a lot of the Pacifica audience - I don't
see anything like the careful distinctions that Mandel makes. What I see
in the anti-commercial gang is just the kind of asceticism that Mandel
criticized in orthodox Marxists, though without the class angle. My friend
Carrie McLaren, who publishes the 'zine StayFree , isn't quite out there
with the hair-shirters, but she does have a streak of it. She was alarmed
to hear that a mutual friend had dyed her hair. I think dyeing hair is
just fine (though I haven't taken it up yet). I'll bet a lot of the Buy
Nothing people don't like makeup either. I'll bet a lot of PEN-Lers don't
approve of makeup or stylish clothes either. Doug --------------------
Hey, I got my hair streaked gold last week! It doesn 't show up much on
white though. And the stylist assured me it would wash out, which it did.
But I still don't understand why ANY criticism of consumption makes the
critic a hair-shirter. --------------------- CB: I certainly agree that
Marx and Engels spoke against "barracks socialism". But on the other hand
I've always thought that Marx's notion of commodity fetishism implied that
consumer tastes under capitalism would be inevitably contaminated in some
sense by that "fetish". Wouldn't we expect some significant portion of
commodities in capitalism to be "use-"values that would disappear with
the "clearer" state of mind in socialism/communism ? ------------ Hey!
What is this Yoshie? Theory of inevitable progress? Let me assure Yoshie
and Daniel that I am not a woozy pre-capitalist romantic. But I will continue
to wonder why such assurances are necessary at all. Look at my primitive
tools, youse guys: notebook computers, scanners, printers, spreadsheet
programs, web sites, etc. I hope no one is offended when I confess that
I actually derive sensual pleasure from using these running-dog bourgeois
instruments of oppression and exploitation. HORRORS! But my pleasure doesn't
prevent me from bearing witness to the violence that takes place every
day in the name of my sovereign right to possess a separate notebook computer
for each colour in the rainbow. Let's simplify this discussion: undialectical
critique of capitalism: bad undialectical apology for capitalism: bad dialectical
critique of capitalism: good dialectical apology for capitalism: intellectually
dishonest The latter proceeds by mistaking a dialectical critique for an
undialectical critique and "correcting" it where it needs no correcting.
---------------- This thread had (mostly) developed in terms of characterizations
of either the participants in the thread or of "leftists-in-general." (Tom
mostly avoided this trap, since his posts mostly focused on or attempted
to define the issues involved independently of who believed what, but Doug's
whole concern seemed to be not the issues but a moral characterization
of those who disagreed with him. My own 'contribution' to the thread was
also on character rather than substance -- I apologize.) If we let Yoshie's
post and Tom's response control the discussion, we might say something
useful. Carrol P.S. An empirical point. I believe a poll of "leftists"
today whould reveal that Doug's position is that of the overwhelming majority.
"I believe" -- I don't know, and neither does anyone else on this list.
----------------- Tom, we can't "focus on the individual's role when discussing
solutions to the planet's problems" (as Shawna Richer says Sut Jhally does)
such as the individual's consumer choices. That's not a dialectical critique
of capitalism. That's more like a program of Global Exchange, Oxfam, Simply
Living, and so on. All staffed and supported by well-intentioned people,
I'm sure, but that's ultimately a liberal dead end. Socialism's point is
not so much to oppose commodification as to take collective control of
_what has already been socialized through commodification_ by abolishing
the private ownership of the means of production. Criticisms of commmodification
make sense mainly when what's being commodified, that is privatized, is
_already explicitly publicly owned or customarily in the public domain_,
like air, water, electric power, public education, public transportation,
public broadcasting, and so on. When a housewife becomes _a wage laborer_,
her labor power becomes, well, _commodified_, but socialists don't object
to that, do we? When what used to be provided by unpaid women's labor becomes
_commodified_ -- for instance, care of the old, now often provided by nursing
homes -- should socialists bitch and mourn commodification as such? Or
should we rather seek to turn a commodified service provided by capitalists
into a social program provided by the government, raise wages and benefits
for workers, etc.? -- Yoshie ------------------ May we allow for the possibility
of more than one dead end? I agree that individual consumer choices, no
matter how well-intentioned do not "add up" to social transformation. However,
"taking collective control" and "abolishing private ownership" are actions.
As verbs they demand nouns. Who is the we to do the doing? The party? The
state? The masses? Organized labour? A bunch of folks who show up at demos
and read theory? The p-p-p-proletariat? I ran into a former colleague this
morning on his way to deliver a talk about his organization's "Community
Development Institute", a high-minded enterprise that teaches folks social
skills for the world of the 1970s. I admire such dogged . . . well doggedness.
I guess. Organized labour? Don't get me started. Unions are my bread and
butter (not to mention rent and all the rest). Despite occasional rhetorical
flourishes, they are not in the business of fundamental social transformation.
If Doug can be cynical about anti-consumer hairshirts, allow me my reservations
about the class in itself, of itself and for itself. Funny you should mention
the individual (or the Individual). My sandwichman project and my graphic
dwell on the mythos of the self-made man. Can't get more individual than
that. Note I said _mythos_ not myth. The OS is crucial and conveniently
suggests precisely an operating system. That operating system can perhaps
be better understood through a series of thought experiments: 1. Take simple
living for example. Read Benjamin Franklin's prescription for self-sufficiency,
the locus classicus of the self-made man genre. What you will see is that
voluntary simplicity is pure, unadulterated Ben Franklin. Those other guys,
Horatio Alger, Andrew Carnegie and a host of 19th century success touts
represent a digression. 2. Take Aunt Jemima. Now think of Oprah Winfrey.
What do they have in common? How are they different? In what sense could
one imagine Jemima morphing into Oprah? I'm not the first to make the connection.
See http://www.cegur.com/html/oprahimage.html. What's the point? Oprah
shows that even a woman -- EVEN a woman of colour can become a "self-made
man," provided she's willing to lose enough weight. That is to say to renounce
that which, by its excess, signifies her otherness -- her "mammytude",
shall we say. No personal offense intended to Ms. Winfrey, but her celebrity
in racist America (like pre-Bronco O.J.'s celebrity) rests on her being
the "exception that proves the rule". 3. Do a google search on "self-made
man"; next do a google search on "autonomous subject"; finally do a combined
search. With only a very few exceptions, there isn't an overlap between
texts that use the terms. Why is this so when the pair of terms is virtually
synonymous (leaving aside connotations)? Isn't it, then, precisely the
relationship between the individual and the collective that remains the
problem? If that's so isn't it begging the question to pre-emptively reject
individual solutions and posit a collective revolutionary subject to do
all the abolishing, socializing and taking control? Doesn't even the possibility
of a collective revolutionary subject come down to a matter of individual
commitments to build such a collective? Aren't these all rhetorical questions?
>Criticisms of commmodification make sense mainly when what's being >commodified,
that is privatized, is _already explicitly publicly >owned or customarily
in the public domain_, like air, water, electric >power, public education,
public transportation, public broadcasting, >and so on. > >When a housewife
becomes _a wage laborer_, her labor power becomes, >well, _commodified_,
but socialists don't object to that, do we? I don't know where to begin
to respond to a question that assumes socialists don't object to the commodification
of labour power. It was not Marx's position that wage labour represents
the pinnacle of human emancipation. I'm inclined to agree. And it is not
the case that the commodification of women's labour is a recent innovation.
It also is not the case that "socialists" (including women) have always,
unequivocally supported full participation of women in the labour force.
Nor can such positions be dismissed on purely ideological grounds (against
patriarchy) without also taking into account the strategic and tactical
considerations behind claims about the unique "delicacy" of women with
respect to certain kinds and conditions of labour. This is not to say that
the strategy and tactics *justified* discrimination against women any more
than racism against chinese immigrants at the turn of the century was *justified*
by employers use of immigrant labour to undercut wage rates. It is to point
out that one dismisses such pragmatic consideration at the risk of discounting
the integrity of "the collective subject". And that places us right back
in the puzzle of the relationship between individual and collective action.
To conclude, IMHO wage labour long ago served its historical purpose and
has only one thing positive left to offer to humanity: the struggle to
overthrow it. It makes little sense to disparage the effectiveness of individual
consumer choice while extolling the emancipatory virtues of the individual
sale of wage labour. Tom Walker -------------------------- ay Doug, > michael
perelman wrote: > > >Sabri, please be more respectful of Dr. Rushton. He
will probably > win > >the Nobel Prize or even imortatlity, I believe,
for having discovered > > >the inverse relation between IQ and penis size.
> > I know this is a joke, Michael, but the bourgeois science thinks >
Rushton is a fraud and an embarrassment. Before Hitler, racist > science
got plenty of respect, but it doesn't really anymore. The > Bell Curve,
despite its popularity, isn't mainstream science - though > it might be
the hidden underside of liberal bourgeois tolerance (as > Zizek said of
the relations among Laibach, nationalism, and fascism). > Racism doesn't
have much scientific prestige - except maybe in some > economic models,
where the entry of black workers is treated as a > decline in labor force
quality. It's trickier to deal with bourgeois > ideology than it used to
be. And the staff of the IMF is more > "diverse" than most First World
left organizations. I realise that by the projected Rushton logic I should
be endowed with a short fat one a foot long, but one thing that occurs
to even me is that an IQ test is a cultural product with questionable cross-cultural
applicability (and I'd LOVE to see how one arrives at the average IQ for
Sierra Leone, for that matter). It also occurs that one criticism that
can still be made of liberal bourgeois scientism (as manifest in neoliberalism
in general and the IMF record in particular) is that it ethnocentrically
universalises the particular with blithe abandon (eg stuff that has worked
for a while in or for the hegemon will work for the minor dependent economy).
So on that scientism criterion, I think there's a definitive parallel to
be drawn (and, yes, I agree a few Marxists we both know - elsewhere - falter
at that hurdle, too). I do reckon you've a point about diversity, even
heterodoxy, in today's establishment, but aver it might be better made
with reference to Wolfenson's World Bank. Waddyareckon? Cheers, Rob. ----------------
Migration of Muslims to West will continue Chicago Tribune; Chicago, Ill.;
Feb 28, 2002; Behzad Yaghmaian, Associate professor of Economics, Ramapo
College of New Jersey; Abstract: The Sept. 11 tragedy changed the world
of migration. Combating terrorism and halting illegal migration coincided.
A new enemy was created--Muslim migrants from the Middle East and North
Africa. They were potential terrorists. They had to be kept out. Borders
were closed. New walls were erected. The West closed its gates to migrants
from the region. But the underlying causes of the migration of Muslims
to the West persist. Thousands continue to venture into the dangerous journey
of migration with the hope of finding salvation in the West. They flee
war, political conflict, poverty and the hellish life under Islamic fundamentalism.
Full Text: (Copyright 2002 by the Chicago Tribune) The Sept. 11 tragedy
changed the world of migration. Combating terrorism and halting illegal
migration coincided. A new enemy was created--Muslim migrants from the
Middle East and North Africa. They were potential terrorists. They had
to be kept out. Borders were closed. New walls were erected. The West closed
its gates to migrants from the region. But the underlying causes of the
migration of Muslims to the West persist. Thousands continue to venture
into the dangerous journey of migration with the hope of finding salvation
in the West. They flee war, political conflict, poverty and the hellish
life under Islamic fundamentalism. For many, international migration is
the only escape from the cultural and political violence of fundamentalism.
Plagued by unending wars and sociopolitical instability, and driven away
from the possibility of a life of peace at home, many have become voyagers
in search of survival in faraway lands. This seems to be the story of most
Iraqi, Afghani and Kurdish migrants caught behind borders in the West.
Devastated by war and political violence, millions have also been subject
to destructive economic changes beyond their control: the globalization
of economics and culture. Displacement and migration have been the result.
The introduction of market relations and the transformation of subsistence
economies have changed the nature of work in many countries. Millions have
joined the ranks of wage laborers, swelling the labor force in most urban
areas. In the past 30 years, the labor force increased by 176 percent in
the Middle East and North Africa. The unprecedented increase in the labor
force has not been matched by a growth in job creation and improvement
in the standard of living. High unemployment rates persist in most countries
in the Middle East and North Africa. Poverty has been on the rise in many
countries in the region. Intoxicated by the flashy images of the West,
a large number of socially aspiring and culturally adventurous young men
and women have joined the ranks of migrants in recent years. They, too,
flee home for a better world. The recent migratory movement of young Iranians
is a telling example of this development. The Iranian youth echo the inner
aspirations of millions of young people across the Muslim world--a desire
for life with dignity, freedom and the possibility of work with livable
pay. There seems to be no reversal of the existing migration flow to the
West from the Middle East and North Africa in the near future. A growing
number of displaced Muslim men, women and children will be facing closed
borders in Europe. The result will be increased clandestine border crossings,
desperate use of more dangerous routes and methods of migration, exploitation
and abuse by smugglers and human traffickers, and death. A policy revision
is necessary to stop this human drama. ----------------- ttp://www.michaelkelly.fsnet.co.uk/exis.htm
French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban
of Non-Existence of God The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday
when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist
philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots
by proving the non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul
Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones
to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened
by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of
Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of
pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will
drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's
lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number
of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay
by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes
and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else. Their leader, Colonel
Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of
their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven
young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taleban
are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous. There is no God
and I can prove it. Take your tongue out of my ear, Juliet, I am talking."
Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's nauseating freedom
of action with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films
of Alfred Hitchcock. However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to
condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive
smoking from the Frenchmens' endless Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll
on civilians in the area. Speculation was mounting last night that Britain
may also contribute to the effort by dropping Professor Stephen Hawking
into Afghanistan to propagate his non-deistic theory of the creation of
the universe. Other tactics to demonstrate the non-existence of God will
include the dropping of leaflets pointing out the fact that Michael Jackson
has a new album out and Oprah Winfrey has not died yet. This is only one
of several Psy-Ops operations mounted by the Allies to undermine the unswerving
religious fanaticism that fuels the Taleban's fighting spirit. Pentagon
sources have recently confirmed rumours that America has already sent in
a 200-foot-tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taleban front lines glowing
eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while saying, 'I am the way,
the truth and the life, follow me or die.' However, plans to have the giant
Christ kick the crap out of a slightly effeminate 80-foot Mohammed in central
Kabul were discarded as insensitive to Muslim allies. Gene Coyle
-----------------